Box Office: ‘Home’ Takes the No. 1 Spot with $54 Million Debut

The animated family film earned the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office with $54 million to keep Get Hard out of the top of the rankings. In addition, Home performed exceedingly well internationally, bringing in $48.2 million for a worldwide gross of $102.2 million. Starring voicework from Rihanna, Jim Parsons, Steve Martin, and Jennifer Lopez, Home is a huge success for Dreamworks when you consider that the film was only expected to open in the mid-$30 million range. In fact, this is the biggest Dreamworks opening since Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, which opened to $60.3 million in summer 2012. This could also help Dreamworks to recover from the disastrous year they’ve been having, as they recently had to lay off 500 employees and delay How to Train Your Dragon 3 in the process.

At No. 2 was Get Hard, the latest comedy for stars Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell. For an R-rated comedy, this had a wide range of audience appeal, earning $34.6 million in its opening weekend to overcoming the $30 million prediction from studio and industry pundits. The movie now ranks as the largest R-rated opening of Ferrell and Hart’s careers. Costing only $40 million to make, Get Hard is heading into surefire profitability. At the very least, it was enough to ward off the weekend’s third new nationwide release, It Follows. The supernatural horror film earned $4 million, which is actually a fairly good number since the movie only saw release in 1,218 locations, and it only cost $2 million to make. Given the colorful, lighthearted nature of the top films at the box office, it makes sense why there’d be a demand for this sort of horror spectacle right now, since there haven’t been nearly as many decent movies for horror buffs to sink their teeth into this season. To its credit, It Follows performed well enough to place at No. 5, making this the widest release ever from Radius-Dimension films.

Elsewhere, The Divergent Series: Insurgent kept ahead of Cinderella for another weekend. Yet, while Insurgent held No. 3 with $22 million for the weekend, it saw a decline of 58 percent from last weekend, which is a bigger drop than Divergent‘s 53 percent drop in its second weekend last year. Arguably, it could be because Insurgent is still dividing its female-driven audience with the Cinderella crowd. This weekend, Cinderella landed at No. 4 with $17.5 million, taking it over the $150 million mark domestically. In essence, Disney has proven that its initiative to make live-action versions of its animated hits is a fairly genius idea. While Maleficent wasn’t a straight remake of Sleeping Beauty, it served as a parallel tale of sorts. And the upcoming live-action Beauty and the Beast could prove to be just as big a hit as Maleficent if the buzz behind it is any indication.

But how did the rest of the Top 10 perform this week? Check out the full Top 10 at the weekend box office below: